Sound Based Payments – The way to go forward

The magical combination of increasingly connected world, technological innovations and expanding mobile phone market is greatly transforming Fintech industry. India currently is witnessing a transition from a traditional cash driven to cashless economy. Amid this revolution, Finetch firms are embracing technology and leveraging growth of mobile owners to make payments much easier and secure for the end users. Latest ship at the dockyard of technology is “Sound based Payments”. This radical technology is definitely a game changer enabling payments without Internet connectivity.

While our devices are ever more connected, but still poor connectivity while using Internet is a big hurdle for making payments. In such a case, data is transferred using peer-to-peer connectivity like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct, or Near-field communication (NFC). But again, these solutions have specific requirements of hardware and APIs which may not be available in all the devices. However, every device comes with a microphone and a speaker. So here comes an alternative, i.e. data transmission using sound waves.

Thus, use of sound based transmission in the form of “Sound Based Payment” is going to benefit the Fintech industry the most. Such payments work independently of Internet connectivity or communication tool such as NFC to enable payment. User can offer payment from smartphones, feature phones, card swipe machines and point-of-sale devices with the use of sound.

Working of Sound Based Payments

Sound based payments can be made by anyone having a bank account and a mobile phone. Using a unique ultra high frequency encrypted sound-based technology will enable you to pay directly from any of your bank accounts or credit/debit cards to the merchant account offline.

In the process of Sound wave technology, data is encoded into sound waves with the help of an algorithm which can then be transmitted to make offline payments. To make this happen, algorithm has to be integrated in the buyer’s mobile phone as well as the merchant’s phone or card readers.

Merchant enter payment detail like bill amount on his device

Numbers are converted to analog format with using the Algorithm

Encrypted analoged data is transmitted to buyer’s phone as a sound signal

Buyer’s phone is placed near merchant’s device to receive signals

Buyer’s phone receivess data and decrypts the received data.

Payment can then be made using debit card / credit card / digital wallet.

Working Prototype:

Using this technology we have built a prototype. This prototype has an input field where you can type the text you want to send. When you press the “Send” button, the data is continuously broadcasted alternatively with the Barker code. When another user is close enough to pick up the signal he can press the “Receive” button to get the data on his phone. If the decoding failed (probably due to the surrounding relatively strong interference), it continues to monitor a sound wave transmission, continue decoding.

It is the magical new way to share your stuff – using sound. We can easily transfer any data and it would just require one action from the sender (starting to broadcast) and one action for the receiver (starting listening to all broadcasts).